GUARDIAN ANGELS TO MARCH FOR DELRAY'S SUPPORT

DELRAY BEACH -- The Guardian Angels are organizing a two-day parade along Atlantic Avenue at the end of May, hoping to attract enough support to start a Delray Beach chapter, Angels' organizer Paul Martinelli said Wednesday.

"It will be an anti-drug march and it will be completely new because most of our drug marches take four hours on one day, usually on Sundays," Martinelli, director of the Angels' East Coast chapter, said in an interview.

"This time we will march on two days, Saturday, May 30, and Sunday the 31st," Martinelli said.

"We will set up camp and spend Saturday night inside 'The Hole,' " he said.

The Hole is the "armpit of the cesspool of crime along Germantown Road," Martinelli said, a place where residents report an large amount of cocaine traffic.

Whether the Angels organize a Delray Beach chapter will depend entirely upon support for the program, he said.

The Angels establish chapters in cities using local residents who patrol the streets sporting red berets and an Angel's T-shirt.

If the community really pitches in, it can work, Martinelli said.

The Angels have established chapters in Riviera Beach and Lake Worth. They began a group in West Palm Beach but later withdrew. "We couldn't get enough support from the community," Martinelli said.

"We have to get the grocery store owners, the gas stations and other businesses to have the guts to refuse to sell to known drug dealers," he said.

"They wouldn't do that in West Palm. They have done it in Riviera Beach and Lake Worth," he said.

The bad guys move elsewhere when displaced by the Angels armed with community support, he said. But they move to other bad areas, not to areas that are free of crime, he said.

Martinelli spoke to reporters at the Delray Beach Housing Authority offices after he talked with authority Chairman Bob Hutzler.

Hutzler said Martinelli asked if the Angels could establish headquarters at Carver Estates, a low-income housing project the authority runs in central Delray Beach. The development is a high-crime area. Off-duty police have begun nightly patrols there.

"I have no problem with the Guardian Angels setting up shop here, but I want to talk to the police department and the city manager before we make a decision on that request," Hutzler said.

Martinelli said the Angels would need a second-floor apartment, rent-free, to establish headquarters at Carver Estates. A ground-floor apartment won't do because it is too easy to riddle it with bullets from a passing car, he said.

"I have no objection to good law-abiding citizens," Hutzler said. "But I think the Guardian Angels would be better off without a lot of publicity. Their method of operation is the elimination of drug and crime problems through intimidation and peer pressure," he said.

But Martinelli said the Angels rely heavily on publicity both to attract willing volunteers and to rid high-crime areas of undesirables.

"We target houses where crimes like drugs or prostitution are taking place and we rely largely on information from the community where these houses are," he said.

"It takes tons of evidence to get these people convicted," he said. "But if people in the community say they know drugs are being dealt in a certain house, then we stop in front of that house and rant and rave so everyone in the community knows where they are. That way they can't hide, because everybody knows," Martinelli said.